“You could call (my work) a visual diary or even a personal history. I’m not going to paint anything that doesn’t have anything to do with me…The thing that interests me is something that I can get close enough to in order to paint it honestly.” —— Jonas Wood
Born in Boston, Jonas Wood’s paintings draw heavily on his own encounters, transforming the three-dimensional world of sports, objects, interiors, and people which make up the very tapestry of his life, into pure line and colour. Wood’s paintings are strongly graphic, characterised by surprising shifts in perspective, collage-like disjunctions, agglomerations of dense patterning, teetering between the representational and the photographic, abstraction and figuration. The multiplicity of perspectives and subtle variations of tone call to mind the fractured planes of Cubism, disorienting viewers’ expectations of the familiar and natural as the abundance of detail creates a striking contrast with the day-to-day mundanity of his subject matter. The seemingly haphazard placing of objects, casually strewn across the canvas, breathes warmth into the otherwise unoccupied interiors and landscapes, endowing the space with its own unique history and personality.
Wood’s process involves collage-based studies in which he breaks apart photographs before reassembling them into layered compositions of geometry, pattern, and colour. The elevation of the banal to the status of fine art is, as described by The New Yorker, “painting at its colorful, pattern-happy, and energetic best … (connecting) the dots from Henri Matisse to Stuart Davis to David Hockney. ”i For Wood, art and life are inextricably intertwined.
Dad’s Study 2 is a wonderful example of Wood’s ability to integrate emotionally resonant material from everyday life with a quasi-abstract logic. Vertical strips slice across the work, crisscrossing blocks of blues, pinks, and yellowy beige to carve out the outlines of a desk, files, cards, and other material. While physical absence of human life tinges the work with a sense of nostalgia, the brightness of Wood’s pastel palette revives the work and celebrates the psychological resonances of inhabiting such interiors.
Today, his works are found in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Saatchi Gallery in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.